Introduction
The National Health Research Database (NHRD), developed by the Health Systems Trust
for the National Department of Health, is a web-based search engine and database
that currently contains over thirty thousand references, generally available as
summaries/abstracts, but in addition, for many of the resources, there are links
to full text PDF files of health research conducted in South and southern Africa.
The NHRD is also a tool for use at national and provincial level to receive and
store health research protocols, unpublished literature and provide a low cost method
of providing access to these. It is therefore an electronic repository for both
formal and “grey” literature.
Primary Purpose of the NHRD
The primary purpose of the NHRD is to provide a central storage database for all
health research conducted in South and southern Africa. Closely allied to this,
is the NHRD’s ability to function as a knowledge management tool for health research
that is planned, produced, published or documented by both South African and other
researchers conducting research in southern African communities and facilities.
Intended users of the NHRD
While the NHRD is accessible in the public domain, the primary users are intended
to be research managers as well as researchers involved in conducting health research.
These might range from researchers based at academic institutions to students conducting
health research, government-based health managers, providers and policy makers.
Among these more generic groups of users, the NHRD is intended specifically to be
a useful tool for the National and Provincial Health Research Committees (NHRC and
PHRCs) and other research institutions who need to analyse trends of research conducted
in their respective jurisdictions to improve the process of health research priority
setting. The rationale for this is to direct and encourage researchers to focus
on areas where there are health research gaps. The NHRD has been developed so that
it will allow the NHRC and PHRCs to be able to manage the process of proposal submission
and facilitate the vetting and approval of research.
Obtaining References for the NHRD
The majority of references in the NHRD have been derived from international public
domain databases such as PubMed, which review articles in peer-reviewed international
journals. These have been supplemented by harvesting research from a variety of
other sources, including, for example, searching websites and incorporating research studies submitted to Provincial Health Research Committees. Although at the moment the updating
of the database is done manually, the intention is to gradually automate the search
engine so that it updates itself as new articles appear in the literature.
For further information, please click here to download our 2009 Manual.